6 Simple Rules For Marketing Your Product Or Service Online

1. Keep your pitch simple. You should be able to explain:

• what your product or service is,
• why it’s important, and
• why your company is the best provider

in one paragraph or less. If you can’t do that, you’re bound to have trouble marketing online. Here’s our paragraph:

Spork Marketing helps small and medium businesses promote their products and/or services on the Internet, the fastest-growing and most cost-effective advertising medium in the world. We specialize in a search-engine oriented online marketing. We don’t require long-term contracts, and our low minimum budget means we can help almost any business. Contact us for a free consultation.

2. Define specific and attainable goals. What do you want your Internet marketing to accomplish? Don’t just say “sales” – break it down a little further into the types of actions that create sales like phone calls, emails, downloads of a company white paper, etc. Internet marketing works really well when you define a “funnel,” or a series of actions that lead to your ultimate goal.

Once a funnel is defined, it’s easy to focus on filling one end of the funnel and managing the process from there.

3. Track everything. Every website should track:

• Where visitors come from (both source and geography), how long they stay on your site, what pages they look at, what links they click on, what forms the fill out, etc. Basically, every website needs Google Analytics (or similar).
• Calls. If you have a web site and you don’t have any idea how many calls it generates, you’re missing out on a huge metric. The Internet has replaced the yellow pages, but it hasn’t replaced the telephone. People still call instead of emailing.

4. Incorporate email marketing, online video, and search engine marketing into your strategy. In my opinion, the three pillars of online marketing are email, video, and search. A fourth pillar (social) is under construction…but it might turn out that social marketing is simply an add-on to the big three.

Note that I’m suggesting you make email, search, and video part of your STRATEGY. These aren’t just tactical marketing tools – they’re the foundation of a successful online marketing effort.

5. Narrow your focus and specialize. No business owner wants to turn away potential opportunities by specializing in a particular area. However, without specialization, it’s very difficult to stand out from the crowd. Successful online marketing requires your business to specialize:

1. Specialize by industry. Do you provide consulting services to every industry on the planet, or do you specialize in one industry (or maybe 2 or 3)?
2. Specialize by purpose. Do you sell beer to the masses like Budweiser, or do you sell hand-crafted specialty beers like Breckenridge Brewery?
3. Specialize geographically. Will you install a hot water heater in any home in North America, or do you specialize in the Detroit area?
4. Specialize by consumer. Do you want to sell insurance to everyone like Progressive, or do you want to specialize in people over 55 like the AARP?
5. Specialize by becoming the premium option. Would you rather sell a bucket of regular old ice for $0.99, or a bucket of perfectly spherical ice for $1,440? Personally, I’d rather make the $1,400 selling ice…but that’s just me.

The point of all of these examples is that successful companies large and small specialize because specialization works. Internet marketing requires businesses to specialize somehow – it’s almost impossible to be visible otherwise.

6. Your web site needs improvement. I don’t care who built it, I don’t care how well you think it works, the reality is that most websites need improvement…and improvement starts with testing. User testing, landing page testing, etc. are essential to a web site’s success. I will freely admit that this website could be better – every time I test something, I usually find a way to make an improvement.